Official Mass Storage USB for Wii!

With many people complaining about the small size of the 512MB internal memory o Nintendo's Wii and the current lack of compatibility between the system and externa USB storage devices, there appears to be good news on the horizon. An official Press Release has gone out from eSOL, Ltd, stating that its leading embedded middleware products, "PrFILE2" FAT file system and "PrUSB/Host" USB host stack, have been selected by Nintendo for use with the Wii console.

Both software products constitute fundamental functionalities in the Wii console - managing and transferring data and files with external media. In particular, PrFILE2 provides file management functions that read and write data from SD memory cards, as well as other media. PrUSB/Host functions are used in Wii, to provide USB host functions.

"I am very happy that we could take part in the development for Wii, a new game console from Nintendo. I believe that our products were selected because Nintendo highly-valued our long, successful history with many digital consumer products and high-reliability and functionality based on that. We will continue to provide superior products and technical services to strongly support developers in embedded software development."
- Nobuyuki Ueyama, Executive Vice President, Embedded Products Division at eSOL.

So could this finally be the answer we have all been looking for when it comes to downloading lots of Virtual Console games?

I'm skeptical. Does this finally expand the channels menu? or is this just another way to transfer files similar to SD where you can back up VC games and save files but have to copy them back to internal memory to actually use them?

Will they finally put a real media channel that can access this storage for MP3s and videos?

Will this be a proprietary solution or will any USB flash drive or hard drive work?

This could be big if the answers to the above questions go the right direction, otherwise it could just be a look what we can do marketing. I'm hoping that this also comes with an update to the SD slot allowing bigger cards and possibly opening it up to be able to play games and save directly to the SD card rather than having to copy back and forth.

Couple of things I'm wondering-
-Will it cost more than a 360 HDD? Aka Please use 3.5" HDD's or make it user upgradeable. OR just allow any pre-formatted HDD in a caddy to work via USB.
-Will this work just like internal memory? Can you run channels off it?

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